Record your musical ideas and hear them in different sounds/instruments changing in real time the selected sound. This is a great solution for composers and songwriters who need to explore their tunes in different ways and in different arrangements.

Let the Vultus help you to find the right notes in the following scales:

I posted about the iPad version of this the other day. Now there's an iPhone version too.

MUSYS is a music understanding system developed for Apple iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch platforms. Use MUSYS to tune your instrument, transcribe music, figure out a song, as an improvisation tool, learn music theory, or do harmonic mixes. See music while you listen to it – from the sound spectrum, to notes on a musical staff, to scales, chords, and key changes in the circle of fifths.

MUSYS “understands” the theory of Western music in terms of notes, scales, chords, and keys. It starts by detecting musical pitches in an audio signal. After correcting for overtones (since sometimes the harmonics of musical instruments are louder than the fundamental pitch), and removing correlated background sounds (e.g., from percussion instruments), pitches are converted into notes that are displayed on a standard musical staff. Next, MUSYS uses model-based techniques to fit musical scales to melodies and chords to harmonies. 2-D maps show the chords and scales that best match the music being played. Finally, MUSYS uses the match scores of scales as “votes” for the current musical key in the circle of fifths.

GO TO DEVELOPER WEB SITE FOR DEMO VIDEO AND TECHNICAL DESCRIPTION

(RECOMMENDED FOR IPHONE 3GS and 4. FOR OLDER DEVICES USE PITCH TO NOTE, PITCH TO NOTE+, AND WHAT KEY.)

There have been a few apps like this, but I thought that this one was worth mentioning as it also has audio pasteboard. Here are the specs.

RVT-1 is pure entertainment. Sing like a chipmunk or get crunk with a deep voice.

With RVT-1 you can transform your voice into a booming monster, squeaky mouse, or anywhere in between. In addition, the ability to modulate your voice can alter the effect from word slurring to robotic. To top it off, a reverb mix control allows you to go from in-your-face to in a giant cave.

To make sure that no unwanted background noise is heard, adjust the squelch knob.

RVT-1 automatically saves the current recording into the audio pasteboard for further sound manipulation.

RVT-1 is best suited to use with headphones.

You don't have to always talk or sing into the mic, try changing the settings and listen to the people and noises around you! Make your mom sound like a man or your dad sound like a lady. You could even make the most boring TV show instantly hilarious by making everyone sound like chipmunks.

Please note that RVT-1 cannot change your voice while you are making a call with your iPhone.

Polywave is a polyphonic graphic synthesizer built from the basic elements of subtractive synthesis. At its core, Polywave is has one oscillator, one filter, one envelope, one low frequency oscillator, and a 4 octave touchpad.

Polywave has been designed to be an introductory synthesizer for budding sound sculptor with enough features that even a pro will enjoy creating sounds in a new and unique way.

Polywaves takes the synthesizer into the visual realm by allowing you to draw the waveform of the oscillator, envelope, and LFO. You are literally playing the sound that you have drawn on screen.

By drawing the waveform of the oscillator, you can create very complex waveforms that would take a host of modules and manipulation just by swiping your finger across the screen. In the oscillator screen, you can apply either the envelope or LFO to modulate the pitch of the oscillator over time. Don't let the display fool you, the oscillator waveform has a much higher resolution than what is shown on screen. Polywave tracks every pixel your finger touches while drawing the waveform.

Since you can also draw the envelope and LFO controllers in any shape you want, you can make wild, unheard of sounds by applying these controllers to either the pitch or filter destinations.

To use the envelope, draw the shape of the envelope (goodbye ASDR) and set where you want the sustain to hold. (TIP: by drawing above the middle of the window, the envelope values will be positive, by drawing below, the values will be negative.)

To use the LFO, draw the shape of the waveform and set the speed at which it repeats.

If you need to get that perfect waveform, don't fret, by holding any top button down, a list of available presets will be displayed.

To take it further, 3 filter modes are available, this includes the standard low pass filter, high pass filter, and band pass filter. The filter curve is The filter also allows the routing either the envelope or LFO to modulate the cutoff frequency.

Earlier today I posted about The Strange Agency have releasing Curtis for the iPad, which is great. I've been having a play with this app on my iPad and so far I think it is good translation of the original app to the iPad.

The iPad version does give you some more flexibility and also the ability to bring your samples in via iTunes.

I always liked the otiginal app on the iPhone a lot, and this version on the iPad is good, but not different enough as yet. I'm hoping that the Strange Agency will bring more features to the iPad app to make use of the iPad's ability.

The Strange Agency have released Curtis for the iPad, and if you're quick you might find that some of the codes they left on their site are still available!
The first granular synthesizer for the iPhone comes to the iPad!

Granular synthesis works by combining many tiny grains of sound from an existing recording, creating new sounds with the texture of the original, now with endless temporal possibilities. Play the sound forward, backward, or even at a single point!

I was away last weekend at the WOMAD festival Charlton Park. It was a great festival this year and I really enjoyed it. I've written a bit more about it at my personal blog, but I thought you might be interested in a few things.

Whilst at the festival I ended up playing at the Roots Architecture stages a couple of times with friends which was great fun. The Roots Architecture stages were amazing and brilliant to play on.

I'm already a big fan of ThumbJam, it is a great app, so I was really pleased to hear that it was becoming a universal app.

Last night I tried it out on my iPad for the first time and although I don't think I can put my finger on why it is so much better on the iPad, I can tell you that it is. Perhaps it is something to do with the additional screen space or that it is simply a lot more powerful than my old iPhone 3G, but running ThumbJam on the iPad was excellent.

I'm really looking forward to seeing what new iPad specific features come out next for ThumbJam
in the next release, it can only get better from here.

Lots of sites have been talking about the new Kindle device from Amazon. Yes it is really cheap with the wifi version only £109! Amazing.

Initially I was excited, then wondered what I would do with this if I got one? I already have the kindle app on my iPhone / iPad. So, is the Kindle capable of anything to do with mobile music at all? I know it has text to speech, so it must be able to do something with audio, but more than that I don't know.

It seems like it could be an interesting platform, with a low entry barrier, but I'm guessing that until there is some indication of it being more than a book reader it won't be ticking any mobile music boxes for a while.

My sort of weekly look at where we are with the (incredibly) long awaited SynthStation 25 from Akai.

DolphinMusic in the UK now have the Akai SynthStation listed as being available within 7-10 days. The price quoteed is £79.99, so no change on that part.

Musician's Friend in the US still has the Akai SynthStation25 listed as available from the 18th of August! They have it priced at $99.

And lastly Music123 also have the Akai SynthStation25 as available from the 18th of August at $99.

So perhaps we might see the controller arrive in the UK sooner rather than later. I won't hold my breath. So it is anyone's guess as to what's happening with this device and when any of us can get that SynthStation app working as it was intended.